what has gone wrong with Norton

There is no need to use Norton on a Mac, the Mac operating system has all the security features built in.

Norton will reduce performance, and does not protect the Mac any more than a system without it.

Download the uninstaller from the Norton website, uninstall Norton and the Mac will improve in performance.

I agree with Gary. No need for Norton. I haven't used any kind of AV on my mac or windows pc. You just have to surf smart. Lot's of info on the net to know how to do that. To start with keep your OS up to date, don't open links in emails from senders you don't know, and stay away from the naughty sites your mother wouldn't approve of. 😉

Norton has been in a steady state of decline ever since Symantecs bought it back in the nineties. In its current form I would not trust it at all on a Mac. I suggest that you uninstall it.

Allan

norton is pretty bad they make most their money by comming preinstalled on many computer and the users just pay when the trail is don because they don't know any better

so even in windows world there are much better even free alternativs to norton

Norton Antivirus (made by Symantec) has a very long and illustrious reputation for mangling Mac OS X systems, sometimes to the point where a complete reinstall is necessary. Among other things, it installs kernel extensions which are known to cause kernel panics and system freezes; it contains known and documented bugs which can silently corrupt Adobe Photoshop and Adobe InDesign files, destroy a user's ability to authenticate as an administrator, and (on PPC systems) can cause Classic to stop functioning; and Symantec has on at least two occasions now released flawed .dat file updates which erroneously report certain critical Mac OS X files as "viruses." (Deleting these "viruses" causes damage to the system that in some cases renders it unbootable.)

Norton Removal Tool (Symantec Uninstaller):

http://www.symantec.com/business/support/index?page=content&id=TECH103489&locale =en_US

Indeed that's an exellent example of when you will need AV software. Bu you never need anything made by Nortons. As Klaus1 says, they have a very bad rep with mac users for creating system instability. There are others and the most common recommendation is for ClamXV which won't damage your system and is free as well.

I'll chime in and agree with everyone else that Norton needs to be removed. I have actually run some tests of many anti-virus apps on the Mac, and Norton's detection rates of Mac malware are just so-so. Not that great, but not so bad that I would call it fraudulent or anything. Of course, it sounds like you're really not concerned about detection of Mac malware, so that's probably not your main concern.

However, everytime I have tested Norton, I have had problems. The test system always runs like a dog with Norton installed, to a degree that far exceeds anything I saw from any other anti-virus software I tested, and even crashed once so badly that the test system would not longer start up. I didn't do any official benchmark or stability tests, but my informal observations support the prevailing opinions that Norton is poison on a Mac.

For your purposes, you really don't need something as intrusive as Norton anyway. You just need to be able to scan files that have been sent to you before passing them on to someone else. ClamXav is a good option, and if you download from the developer's site rather than the App Store, it can be configured to watch specific folders. (You really don't need to be watching your entire hard drive or running constant scans of the whole thing.) Another option would be BitDefender from the App Store. BitDefender is another that is just so-so with Mac malware, but it is supposedly very good with Windows malware. (I have no personal experience with that.) BitDefender could be used to scan files manually before re-sending them.

One last note: if your anti-virus software detects an infected file, do not delete it! Doing so could be damaging, especially if the file is part of an e-mail message, in which case deleting it the wrong way could corrupt your mailbox. In addition, deleting it eliminates all possibility of learning more about the threat. Could it affect your Mac? Might it have already done so? Can the file be cleaned? How freaked out should the person who sent it to you be? Might it be a false positive? These kinds of questions become very difficult to answer if you reflexively delete the file. Remember, having a malicious file on your hard drive or attached to e-mail does not equal infection... it can sit there just fine, in perfect safety, as long as you don't open it. (I should know, I've got hundreds of malware samples on my machine, and I'm definitely not infected.)